EDIT: It appears that it is not the Rankin/Bass version of Life and Adventures. So this deal does not quite reach the "Holy balls, you guys" level of excitement I originally indicated. Oh well, I'll leave it here because A Wish for Wings That Work is still pretty great.

They Might Be Giants perform the entirety of Flood Live in Australia; free download if you give them a valid E-Mail address.

So far I've only listened to the first couple tracks (Road Movie to Berlin and They Might Be Giants -- the tracks are in the opposite order they were on the original album) but they're good. Road Movie has a verse that wasn't in the studio version, and TMBG is a bit faster and, obviously, has a new instrumentation for live performance instead of the artificial sounds on the original (emphasis on guitar, keyboards, and backup vocals).

Thad wrote:They Might Be Giants perform the entirety of Flood Live in Australia; free download if you give them a valid E-Mail address.

So far I've only listened to the first couple tracks (Road Movie to Berlin and They Might Be Giants -- the tracks are in the opposite order they were on the original album) but they're good. Road Movie has a verse that wasn't in the studio version, and TMBG is a bit faster and, obviously, has a new instrumentation for live performance instead of the artificial sounds on the original (emphasis on guitar, keyboards, and backup vocals).

Supposedly they did something similar when they came though here awhile back. I missed it because I'd already seen them and I had work, and I've been kicking myself for it ever since. I'll check this out when I get home.

The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross is half-price on Kobo and Amazon (and probably other assorted ebook vendors too). Not sure if it's intended as a permanent price drop (give the readers a taste of the first book for cheap so they're likelier to buy it and the sequels) or just a temporary one.

That Amazon link is, per usual, an affiliate link. Whereas Kobo has a deal where they kick part of the sale back to local bookstores. Check if your favorite local bookstore has a deal with them; if not, mine does and you can sign up through them. It's a Tor book, so both the Kobo and Amazon versions should be DRM-free.

Bloodline Feud is the first book/first two books of the Merchant Princes series (which was originally written as a trilogy, hacked up into a sextet instead, and recently re-edited back into a trilogy). It's a pretty clever take on the many-worlds genre, with an emphasis on the economic implications of traveling between parallel earths. It also takes a rather smart and well-considered look at the usual tropes of divergence and reconvergence, and has a well-thought-out ruleset for how traveling between worlds works (only certain people can do it; it's tied to a recessive gene; it takes a physical toll and so can only be done a maximum of a few times a day; they can take objects or other people with them but only what they can carry) and what the implications of those rules are, narratively, technologically, and sociopolitically.

I really enjoyed the first two books and am about to buy the third. I think the worldbuilding is fantastic and Stross is at the top of his speculative game. It was written in 2002, so the stuff set on "our world" is kinda in that uncanny valley where it's just recent enough for me to frequently forget it's not set in the present and just outdated enough that I get occasionally jarred out of the narrative when I'm reminded of it by references to, say, PDA's, and the administration's intent to go to war with Iraq. But that's not really a criticism so much as the nature of near-future SF.

There's a new trilogy coming, set in the same universe(s). I'm interested in seeing Stross revisit it.

Gaiman rarities in the new Humble Books Bundle. Also, CBLDF Defender #1 is free right now. (For those who don't know, CBLDF is the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which, among other things, provides legal assistance to people who are charged with criminal offenses for possessing or selling comic books that someone decides they shouldn't possess or sell.)

Adding: I don't know of this happening before, but the average donation to the Gaiman bundle is actually more than the $15 intended as the "top" level. So the (so far) eight books intended as the middle tier have become the top tier, with the four books in the $15 "top" tier going for (at the time of this writing) $4.40 less.